Last week, I attended SHU Skit night. I haven’t been to a Skit Night in almost 10 years. It’s cool to see that some things don’t change. My Brothers in Omega Phi Kappa came in 1st place and my Sisters in Delta Phi Kappa came in second place. Even years later, we still got it. We got it so much that other Greeks on campus have to copy our formula for success.

Skit night is more than just having a funny, engaging and entertaining story - you also have to be able to give a little extra. The extras have been in the form of Stepping, dancing, ’sitting’, ‘clapping’, and ‘drumming’. I will go into each one a bit.

Stepping - For years Omega and Delta have been known as the Steppers on campus. Being the most culturally diverse Greek organizations, we have adopted the art of Stepping performed by the Divine Nine National Black Fraternities and Sororities.

Dancing - whether full routines (MJ’s Thriller sequence) or those from the SHU Dance Team, they were performed by Beta Delta Phi, Neu Epsilon Omega and Zeta Iota Lambda this year.
Sitting - a series of coordinated preschool hand claps performed by Lamba Sigma Phi years ago (nothing like grown ass men going back to elementary school days. From what I remember, they were pretty good!).

Clapping - a series of coordinated ‘high-fives’ and exercise-like movements that was performed by Phi Omega Tau. They did not do that this year (and from what I heard about it - thank God!!!).

Drumming - take one part Drumline, one part Stomp, some folding chairs from the cafeteria along with recycling bins and you got yourself a mini headache courtesy of Alpha Sigma Psi (Lamba also did this for Skit Night).

Apparently, this formula does not work for everyone. To me, it is in poor taste to do certain things. For example, if Omega were to ’sit’ as part of their skit, it could be perceived as disrespectful. The only universal thing that is accepted across the board is dancing. As part of their skit, Lambda decided to incorporate a Step. Not to say that Omega and Delta are the only ones that should Step, it is more along the lines that they are the only ones that CAN Step. Those boys looked so uncomfortable doing it that it was hard to watch (kinda like these guys here - the girls help them out a little). Once the shock of watching them do a Step (that is very close to what Omega does) wore off, the part where I got insulted set in. It was an insult to the art of Stepping. Whether they did it to be a part of their ‘winning formula’ or it was a intended to get a rise out of Omega, it was an absolute disgrace. If a Divine Nine member was in the audience, they would not have been flattered at all. Note for the future boys - leave it alone!!!

I recorded Delta’s and Omega’s skits. Once the movies are formatted, we will include them in another post. For now, here is a sample of what my Sisters have done recently at the SHU Family Showcase. It is so good to be a Founding Sister and be able to see a tradition started so long ago still strong years later.

Today, I got my first ticket EVER - via mail…the @!#&% MAIL!!! No thrill of being pulled over, no flashlight in my face, no “license and registration, please”…jut a nastygram. I just got these new tags and in all my years of driving I have never felt so robbed. Funny thing is that I NEVER drive in DC…with my own car. I was returning from visiting a friend in Arlington at the time of the ‘offense’.

I’ve been a licensed driver for 9 years and I had the Grand Am for 7. I was pulled over once on Rt. 100 doing 73 in a 55 with a headlight out, but I was able to use my ‘get out of jail free card’ along with my spotless record to get a warning. I’ve driven from Ohio to Texas, Texas to Maryland and Maryland to Maine without getting caught by the cops. Getting a speed photo just begs me to ask why do they even have cops in DC - COWARDS! I was apparently doing 57 in a 45 at the time.

All I am doing is funding some crackhead congressman’s campaign by paying this ticket. If you live in DC and you are reading this, your piece of $%!* city can kiss my ass.

It just works, that’s why.

Suppose you wanted a digital audio player (DAP) that plays audio and video, including TV shows, audio and video podcasts. Suppose you wanted to use a single program to get all this content and sync to your DAP. Suppose you wanted to buy music onilne and download it to your DAP. Only Apple’s end-to-end solution will meet all of those needs. iTunes Music Store (iTMS) + iTunes + iPod = a simple experience that will meet all of those needs.

However, I don’t want an iPod, and I don’t like iTunes. I do like the iTMS though, and have bought TV shows from there. I turned to Apple’s biggest competitor in the DAP market, Creative.

I wanted to do everything stated in the second paragraph with my Creative Zen Vision:M (ZVM), and I learned the hard way that this simply is not possible.

With an iPod, you are locked into iTMS + iTunes. That isn’t much of a choice. When you pick a PlayForSure-friendly player like the ZVM, you are thrown into the opposite situation; you have too much choice. With so much choice, you end up with a haphazard collection of programs to do what iTMS + iTunes can do.

Let’s tackle them one-by-one:

1. Play audio: Easy enough. I use Windows Media Player 11 (WMP11) to sync to the ZVM. No issues here.
2. Play video: This is tricky. The iPod supports a very small set of video codecs, which generate files of extensions like .mov and .m4v. This looks like poor selection, until you realize that damn near any site that produces video has at least one version that is iPod-friendly. Finding video is no challenge for an iPod user. For everyone else, it can be difficult.
3. Buy TV shows: Yeah, it sounds crazy. Pay for TV? The TV I get for free? Yeah, well I’ve done it for Lost, and I don’t regret it. This option is currently only open for iPod users. For the rest of us, we have to turn to solutions that aren’t exactly legal. This has the benefit of being free, but also can be a pain in the ass. You can argue with me until you are blue in the face saying “it isn’t that hard to find a torrent, download the files, convert it to the proper format/size/whatever and copy it to your player,” but you will never convince me because that will not beat the iTMS solution: click to buy, download, sync to iPod. Simple and fast.
4. Audio podcasts: There are a myriad of programs that’ll download audio podcasts for you, like Juice or ZenCast. The problem with those programs is that I don’t want to use them. I use WMP11 to sync my ZVM. Since WMP11 is still in beta, I can only hope that they will add the iTunes-like functionality of downloading podcasts within it so I can uninstall the two programs I mentioned.
5. Video podcasts: This is my most troubling issue. It is really a combination of points 2 and 4, so there really isn’t a need to repeat myself.

To sum it up, I want WMP11 to be the center of my ZVM’s media library. I want it to download my podcasts and do video conversions on the fly to a format that my ZVM supports. I don’t want to be forced to use three different programs to do what iTMS can do by itself (I realize it doesn’t do video conversion, but so much of the video content on the web is already iPod-compatible so that is largely unnecessary).